Book Preview: Awakening

Another preview of my work-in-progress dark fantasy novel. In this one, something long forgotten and inherently evil stirs in the bowels of the world. Its time is close at hand...
Feel free to comment!

*This is taken from a work in progress and in no way represents the final quality of the novel*

Submitted:Apr 18, 2013
Reads: 12
Comments: 0
Likes: 0

Eyes flickered open. Muscles that were dead mere moments before
spasmed and jittered with hunger, bony fingers with long nails
scratching into the wood of a chair and leaving long gouges,
chippings falling to the floor. The head of the corpse rose from
where it had rested, chin against its chest. It blinked, and
looked around with blank eyes.

It was pitch black, but the dead thing could see regardless. The
world looked cold and grey, but it was still sight. It was
confused. Where was it? How did it get there? It was sat in a
wooden chair in a great hall, tucked in under a long table. There
were more chairs around the table. Most were empty, but a few
other nodding, dark bodies sat motionless in some. The room
looked like a feast hall, but there was no feast on the table.
Oh, how it was hungry.

It crept to a door at the end of the tomb-hall and stepped into a
corridor outside. Its booted feet padded silently in the close
stillness. It felt a pang of hunger like some monstrous beast
rearing in its stomach. Oh, how it wanted to eat. Meat, any meat.
Thick. Red. Juicy. Raw.

Bloody.

It breathed hollowly into the darkness. Its lungs were not much
up to the challenge, but it didn't really need to anyway. When it
reached the end of the corridor, stone walled and dusty, earth
punching through collapsed walls in places, it took a flight of
stairs down into the gaping, hungry maw of a cave system.

Hungry, so hungry.

The caves dropped away below him, a great drop; a hidden ravine
like a bloodless vein to the centre of all things. It looked over
the edge. At first it thought there was nothing but more
blackness, but it soon realised that something was resting down
there. Moving.

Breathing.

Shallow breaths, like his, hissing up from the depths in cold
whistles of drafty air. Whatever it was, it was enormous. It was
pale, standing out in the blackness, and it stank. Rot and pus. A
brackish odour, stronger even than the stench of his own degraded
flesh.

It shifted suddenly, rising. A bulbous lump at the end of a long,
scaly body covered in long spines and tumorous globules turned
towards him, like it was looking at him.

The dead creature thought it could make out multiple black
protrusions on the lump, like glinting eyes, but he could not be
sure, as at that moment the lump split vertically down the
middle, exposing the very maw of Hel itself.

The thing was a serpent, but its mouth opened down the centre of
its head instead of having a hinging jaw at the bottom. The mouth
was filled with teeth: hundreds of sharp, viciously curved fangs,
arranged without any semblance of order, a deadly flower bursting
into bloom. The serpent yawned, hot acidic breath billowing up
from its massive throat hundreds of meters below, and the dead
thing felt its flesh burning slightly, and finally it remembered
why it was here, and what it must do. The serpent closed its
mouth and lowered itself back down into the deeper shadows below.

The dead thing turned away and began to instinctively head for
the surface. It had sworn allegiance to The Progeny. Its job was
to kill.